Word: realisms
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...create an image and an ideology of ourselves as heroic expanders of the frontier and innocents who fight evil," she says. "All of that cold war fervor that drove the old westerns has lifted, so you can do more complex and interesting westerns." At a time when gritty urban realism and literal-minded docudramas hold sway, westerns are a refreshing departure. They provide escape, but also a chance to confront issues of universal significance and spiritual weight: a history lesson, but also a reminder of the imaginative power of myth and allegory. All that and a lot of pretty scenery...
Korder, one of the most promising American playwrights, reaches back in style more than half a century to the era before the dominance of kitchen-sink realism, when the American theater was expressionistic and experimental, poetically and politically inflamed. Despite a few sentimental false notes, he is painfully apt about the way we live now. But his play is set timelessly in "the modern era." Marina Draghici's set reinforces this reach for the enduring: its Art Deco windows and wire fences, beer gardens and back alleys evoke the urban sense of living with the decaying legacy of the past...
...rooms of the Communists, giving the reunion an ominous feel that is heightened by the underlying music. When the flashbacks to the ex-stars' boyhood begin, Kaige is careful to inform his viewers of the historical time periods to prevent confusion, and chooses his locales with a feel for realism and authenticity...
...This realism, however, does not prevent Kaige from engaging in artistic symbolism; the lake where the boys, who meet as children in a troupe of actors-in-training, practice their singing is a cool, calm respite from the political strife that dominates the movie, and its diffused, early-morning lighting and wide stretches of green lilypads give it an almost dream-like quality. When Dieyi succumbs to opium addiction later in the film, Kaige focuses on a giant fish bowl to convey his trapped, drugged state, out of which he is forced by the will of Xiaolou...
Freed from the anchor of realism, fiction writers have drifted off in all sorts of strange directions. Huxley's idea was that cloning based on embryo splitting (he called it "bokanovskification") would be used to mass-produce drones for performing menial labor. Huxley's Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were separated from the higher-class Alphas and Betas not just by economic status but also by biologically engineered physical and intellectual traits...